Benefits of IA

In the same way that there aren’t usually concrete answers to IA questions, there aren’t usually well-defined answers to the question “What will happen if we do this?” the intellectually honest answer is probably “Lots of different things.”

IA decisions have far-reaching consequences (good and bad). If there’s a change you want to make, never stop looking for implications and evidence, then tailor that evidence to what ideas have power in your organization at the moment and who you’re talking to.

A site’s information architecture needs to address its metadata, its content model, and its navigation. The metadata must describe every page comprehensively and accurately, allow the portfolio to be usefully subdivided, and let us reuse pages easily. The content model must create a shared mental model between the feature team and the user, ensure simplicity, and create a system that new features can be gracefully integrated into. The navigation must make every page findable, give every page a unique purpose, and connect every page so that no matter where you start, there’s a logical path to where you need to be.

All three of these elements of IA also need to ensure menus, linking, and SEO work together to boost search rank and reduce bounce rate.

References

Kalil, Thomas. “Policy Entrepreneurship at the White House: Getting Things Done in Large Organizations.” Innovations: Technology, Governance, Globalization, vol. 11, no. 3–4, July 2017, pp. 4–21. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1162/inov_a_00253.

In politics, the “intellectually-honest answer is either, ‘It depends,’ or ‘I’m not sure.” (p. 5)